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Biography

Edd is an emerging technology analyst with a broad background in web, open source and data technologies.

Edd works as Vice President of Strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, where he is focused on explaining and exporting the techniques of building strategic data applications from Silicon Valley to industry at large.

He is also a Research Associate at the Leading Edge Forum.

A leading expert in big data, Edd was the founding chair of Strata, the central big data industry event, and the founding editor of peer-reviewed journal Big Data. Edd spent six years as program chair for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Previously, Edd was chair of the XTech / XML Europe conference series for 8 years.

A veteran CTO of internet startups, Edd was the creator of the Expectnation system for conference organization and management and co-founder of life-science intellectual property exchange Pharmalicensing.com.

With a background as a technical educator, Edd has written several books including "Learning Rails", and "Mono: A Developer's Notebook". He was the editor of XML.com and XMLhack.com, and a freelance writer on XML and the semantic web for IBM developerWorks.

Edd's open source contributions included time as a developer on the Debian GNU/Linux project and the GNOME project.

Navigating the Big Data Vendor Landscape

Keynote: The Experimental Enterprise

Keynote: The Experimental Enterprise

InformationWeek: BI: Empowering Employees to Make Smarter Business DecisionsChicago, IL

2014-04-24

Outside-In Agility through New Data Architectures

Leading Edge Forum Executive ForumWashington, DC

2014-05-15

Sample Talks (2)

Navigating the Big Data Vendor Landscape

A maze of twisty databases, all of which look the same, and each claim they're best for the job. Welcome to the world of choosing big data vendors. In this session we'll map out the data tool landscape, and lay out a framework to help you choose a solution, or elect to build one yourself.

The Experimental Enterprise

A company needs stability to operate, but it also needs innovation to compete. Balancing these is difficult, but those companies that maintain a perpetual state of innovation keep their leading position.

The starting point for innovation is experimentation—the freedom and power to try new things, and learn from both success and failure. To make this happen you need two things. First, the cost of failure has to be cheap, or fear will stifle creativity. Second, you need business engagement: great artists know both their art and their medium.

Web pioneers such as Google and Facebook have embraced this experimental attitude, and from these companies have emerged technologies and practices that enable the innovation culture. Continuous deployment, programmable infrastructure, and smart use of data enable rapid experimentation, supporting an organization that is able to learn and adapt.

In this talk I will draw together the components for success, showing how recent changes in technology and software engineering aren’t just best practice, they’re key to transforming and accelerating an entire company.